External Cell Phone as an Extension

General Help
1

Hello,

I’m trying to add my cell phone as an external number so that calls can be routed to it and mainly so that I can use it to record announcements etc.

The reason for wanting to use my cell to record is because right now my installation is on a laptop testbed with no real hardware connected to it.

I have searched the forum but haven’t been able to work it out. I’m on asterisk 11 with PBX 2.11.

2

I hope you have at least X-lite softphone (http://www.counterpath.com/xlite-comparison.html) on one computer for testing. Just use the free version. You can use that and the internal microphone on the laptop.
Even if you can route it to your cell phone, the quality going through a softphone will be a lot better.

3

Thank you for the suggestion - after making this post I did set up a soft phone on the laptop and can use it for recordings and all just fine. (I used Yate because it doesn’t have any flashing ads)

Still, I would like to route calls to my cell phone in the future when there’s no answer at my future desk phone, is there a way to have my cell be an external extension?

4

Create a ring group. On the extension list for the ring group, put:
101
2135551212#
Then in the inbound route, select the ring group as an extension. It will ring both your internal extension 101 and your cell phone number at 2135551212 at the same time (you can send it to any outside number by just putting # at the end). Whichever one you pick up first gets the call. Of course, you can build onto this if you have other needs. Hint: If you want all unanswered calls to go to your cell VM, set the ring time long in the ring group. If you want unanswered calls to go to your PBX, set the ring time short. Experiment to see the correct ring time for you.

5

Thank you!